Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
On Tuesday the weather held its breath; and at a quarter past eleven, two gentlemen rode up the Longbourn drive.
That Mr. Bingley should call surprised nobody; Mrs. Bennet had the parlour arranged for it by ten.
That Mr. Darcy came with him — came in, sat down, took his cup, asked Mr. Bennet a question about the library that detained that gentleman in company a full half-hour beyond his custom — this was matter for a fortnight's conversation in Meryton.
Charlotte Lucas, walking over at noon, sat by Elizabeth and employed her eyes.
"And so," said Charlotte quietly, under the cover of Mrs. Bennet's pressing the seed-cake on Mr. Bingley, "that is the proudest, most disagreeable man in Hertfordshire, drinking tea in your mother's parlour and watching you when you are not looking."
"He is shy," said Elizabeth serenely. "It is my mother's own theory. The whole county had him quite wrong, Charlotte; I cannot think how such a slander began."
"You began it."
"I had the best authority. I have since changed counsel." Elizabeth turned her cup about. "Say what you are thinking; you will anyway."
"Only this — that a man who looks at a woman so had better be secured before she has time to remember her objections," said Charlotte, "and that for once in my life I believe the secure thing and the happy thing may be the same thing, which is against all my principles, and I am quite put out about it. "
Across the room, Mr. Darcy was at that moment enduring Mrs. Bennet's account of the saline draughts for the third time with every appearance of a man hearing fresh intelligence; and when her mother lost her place at the dosage, it was Mr. Darcy who supplied it — accurately, from Sunday's telling, in front of six people and two tea-trays.
"There!" cried Mrs. Bennet, much gratified. "You hear, Lizzy — some people attend when a person speaks. Three grains, just as he says, and not one more."
"Just so, ma'am," said Mr. Darcy, and took more seed-cake.
Elizabeth set down her cup, and did not trust herself to look at Charlotte.
There would be obstacles yet — an aunt of legendary opinions; somewhere a charming lieutenant whose history she would one day learn from a quite different quarter, and weigh quite differently for knowing the man it slandered.
The road from this parlour to that future was long, and nothing about it was yet promised.
But it was the right road now. It had been the right road since Sunday — since the rain came down on Hertfordshire like a hand laid over a chess-board, stopping the old game entire; since a man who economized on words had spent more of himself in a single morning, in a library smelling of damp and old sermons, than in all the assembled evenings of October — on a woman who had come in looking for a book.
She had never found one, Elizabeth reflected, as Mr. Darcy crossed the parlour toward her chair with his teacup borne like a flag of truce.
Sixty years of the same small library, and she would tease him about it at Pemberley yet: the only morning of her life she ever went looking for a story, and came away with the whole of one — unwritten, unrecorded, and hers.
The End